News, pop culture and frosty chocolate shakes

January 31, 2003

You may remember the story of sailor Rich Van Pham, who was rescued near Costa Rica last fall after going disastrously off-course and spending four months adrift. The details of his ordeal -- the way his mast snapped and sails shredded in a storm, how he survived for 120 days on rainwater and roasted sea gulls -- painted a picture of a plucky survivor who'd endured some bad luck. Now it turns out he's just a really, really bad sailor. (LA Times; reg required.)

I wish this AP piece had been bylined so I could send some admiring thoughts to the person who wrote this fabulous lede:

For years, Rene Veenema says he made a small fortune selling real estate plots on the moon. Now he's in jail, on Earth.

Parenthetically, it seems appropriate to wonder who might actually have been gullible enough to pay good money for "title" to a piece of land on the moon. The US company which fronted for Veenema says David Letterman, Johnny Carson and Jimmy Carter were, among others -- a somewhat astonishing claim which AP appears to swallow whole. Gee, you don't think it's possible the company is lying, do you?

January 30, 2003

You know, of all the proposals floated by President Bush in his State of the Union speech, the one that was the most intriguing to me was the initiative to give "nitro-burning funny cars to all, regardless of race, creed, or how well you did or didn't do at Yale." I don't know why this hasn't been more widely discussed.

A University of Virginia study finds that the males of a particular spider species are highly attracted to plump females -- the same ones most likely to, well, eat them. "This is the first evidence that an invertebrate species... chooses its mates based on body condition, i.e. weight divided by length -- how fat you are for your size," UVa biologist Peter Smallwood told Reuters with creepy precision. Smallwood was the leader of the study, which took over eighteen months to complete, mostly due to the arduous process of weeding out female spiders who claimed simply to be "big-boned" or have "a glandular condition."

January 26, 2003

Here's a followup to Friday's item about Sejfulla Myftari, the Albanian entertainer who used comedy to talk his way out of an old-school Balkan ass-whuppin': This site now owns the Google search on "Sejfulla Myftari." We've never been prouder, which is sort of a shame if you think about it.

January 24, 2003

What I love about this story isn't that Krispy Kreme bought a bakery chain, the better to develop a "bakery-cafe concept." It's that their stock plunged south immediately after, as millions of fried-dough aficionados contemplated the possibility of KK being even remotely connected to anything with grain in it. (Via boingboing.)

Sejfulla Myftari, who is for all I know the Carrot-Top of Albania, literally and figuratively disarmed a gang of highway robbers who stopped his car and aimed Kalashnikov rifles at him. "Will you let me hold it, please," the much-loved comedian reportedly told the gunmen, reaching for one of the ancient Soviet-issue rifles. Reuters reports that the highwaymen collapsed in helpless laughter at Myftari's quip, because comedy is apparently tightly rationed in Albania, then "told Myftari and his friends to leave quickly so that they could hold up another car instead." One humorous footnote: A family of four traveling just behind was beaten senseless and robbed of the goat which represented their life's savings. "Thank you, I be here all the week," Myftari cried merrily as he drove out of sight to the sound of the family's screams of pain and terror.

The Alabama chief justice -- yep, the same one who refused as a circuit court judge to remove a Ten Commandments plaque from his courtroom wall despite the nagging, godless insistence of the whiny little bastards at the U.S. District Court -- suggested last night that the 9/11 attacks might be a consequence of America turning away from God. The Gate compares Justice Roy Moore's remarks to those of evangelist/gadfly/publicity hound Jerry Falwell that "pagans, abortionists, feminists, homosexuals and civil liberties groups [have] secularized the nation and helped the Sept. 11 attacks happen," although it adds with a delightfully underplayed sense of the ridiculous: "Moore wasn't that specific." (Via Morning Fix.)

January 23, 2003

The government has ordered a recall of about 364,000 portable wooden cribs marketed under the names Gerry and Evenflo. The products suffer from a design flaw which can cause the crib bottoms to fall out. Other product recalls this week include:

January 21, 2003

You know, you just haven't lived until you've heard "Strangers In The Night" played on the sitar. (I have to admit, though, that "Cast Your Fate To The Wind" makes a certain kind of awful sense.) God bless Basichip for this essential bit of audio history.

It's 36 years later, which means that the futuristic vibe of Canada's Expo '67 now seems 50 years old. The National Archives of Canada do a nice job of invoking that faroff time and place, providing useful nuggets of information like the fact that the USA Pavilion later became "the Biosphère, an ecowatch centre," which almost certainly serves us right. Neat video too, with just the right amount of that sparkly modernist optimism that makes us Boomers weep.

January 17, 2003

If you're an advertiser, have a website to promote or just want to blow your own horn to an audience that's unusually smart and well-informed, think about sponsoring The Spike Report. It's an invaluable daily read, and at five years old one of the longest-running bloglike news and pop culture resources on the web. Now its publisher, USC's Online Journalism Review, has announced plans to pull the plug if sponsorship can't be found by month's end. Interested? Drop Spike a line.

January 15, 2003

It's not all smoothies and skittles in Boulder, where The Daily Camera reports that a SWAT team was called out after a man was seen screaming threats and waving what appeared to be a .45 automatic. The weapon turned out to be a plastic pellet gun, and the "bitch" the guy was heard wanting to "kill" was his computer. The cops left the man his pellet gun, but removed a real gun from the apartment "for safekeeping." The eye-opening part of this story isn't that some citizen got so enraged at the 53rd blue-screen error that day that he actually considered giving his system a hot-lead diagnostic. The thing I can't get out of my head is: Wow, Boulder has a SWAT team? (Via GMSV.)

January 13, 2003

Let's say you're an Australian actor, 60-ish, who once upon a time had the good fortune to be cast as James Bond in the most successful movie franchise ever. You played the part, then watched with dismay as the movie failed so spectacularly that it threatened to sink the whole series. Some people maintain that the movie was actually an underrated gem, but it's too late: You're a punchline.

It's years later and MGM/UA brings out a beautiful boxed set of the Bond films. Okay, so your single moment as Bond isn't included, but you have reason to hope that the buzz may remind the moviegoing public about you. Why, you must even have a fan club somewhere! And off you dash to your computer, typing in "George Lazenby fan club" in giddy anticipation. After all, you did once play the most famous movie spy of them all.

January 09, 2003

Just announced at CES, from "a hitherto unknown group within multibillionaire Paul Allen's Vulcan Inc. techno-empire" (presumably working deep inside a hollowed-out volcano): the Mini-PC. About the size of a paperback, it's one inch thick, weighs one pound, has a 5.8-inch screen, runs WinXP and has onboard Wi-Fi + 3G. This Christmas, $1200 to $1500. That sound you hear is me slobbering. From the Seattle P-I (read it while you can).

"Come on, you kids belong together. You're good together. So what's the problem? Look, lemme explain something to you. In the world I come from you don't let a business arrangement get hung up on details like 'chemistry' and 'sexual compatibility.' You get in there and you do the deal, and if anybody gets in the way you crack 'em like a walnut. So are you two going out for drinks, or am I gonna have to ruin you? And get this: I will ruin you. I know how. I can wreck your credit rating, I can bankrupt your families. I can beat you with a bag of oranges so you die a slow death from internal bleeding and never show a bruise. So come on. Come on. Hey, I'm gettin' that feeling with you two. It's magic time. So what do you say? Okay, lemme just say this. [ominously] It would really be in your best interests to go out on a date."

Let's say you're a loudmouth hothead and provocateur and you get stupid lucky one day and wake up the governor of a good-sized northern state where folks are really nice and friendly and life's not all that bad, don't you know, except that these jerks from the press keep wanting you to answer questions. Anyway, you manage to lurch through your term without, you know, accidentally calling in an air strike on North Dakota, and now all of a sudden you've gotta find a job, and let's face it, you're too old to go back to pro wrestling. If only there were a place in American culture where such a person could go!

January 08, 2003

The New York Times, with reporting partners Frontline and the CBC, performs a real public service today in kicking off its three-part expose of a Texas pipe foundry where working conditions are almost unbelievably brutal. (It also does a good job of webbifying the piece via a Flash sidebar.) The story, by David Barstow and Lowell Bergman with additional reporting by James Sandler and Robin Stein, is horrific, a look at the harrowingly dangerous work environment imposed by a cost-cutting management on a labor force with few economic alternatives. Which makes the choice of an accompanying ad, flacking the NYT real estate section, a little unfortunate: "Looking for luxury? Click here to visit our new Wine Country estates... " (Registration required.)

January 07, 2003

The Bush administration has quietly killed off a program that tracked and reported mass layoffs by American companies. A Labor Department spokesman told reporters that "this is almost like mass layoffs dropping to zero if you think about it that way," offering an enthusiastic thumbs-up gesture and furtively wiping the desperate sheen of sweat from his forehead. (Via GMSV.)

January 06, 2003

Via boingboing, it's scary foreign groceries. There's 14 pages of this stuff, but I wasn't able to get past "Blocky choco flake snacks" from Japan before images of impacted colons started dancing in my head, if "dancing" is the word I want, and I suspect it's not. "Lumbering painfully" is probably more like it.

Coming to this one a little late, but Penn Jillette's tale of federally-sanctioned assault at McCarran Airport is a funky good time. Seems an overzealous security guard took it upon himself to touch the outsized magician inappropriately -- I mean, what the hell was the guy thinking, does he just not watch TV or what? -- and Jillette reacted, well, appropriately, which is to say he made a giant stink and stood pat until the cops arrived. Best part is the running dialogue between the security supervisor (who keeps muttering "We have no problem with him, he's free to go") and the Las Vegas cop who keeps insisting "Your guy grabbed his crank, that ain't right." And all the while, presumably, Jillette is standing there with a blissful smile on his mug, thinking of what a great story this is going to make. Which it does.

January 05, 2003

Otis Fodder, whose invaluable "Friendly Persuasion" is (for now) one of the great casualties of the Internet radio shakeout, has a new project: 365 Days, an MP3 a day right through 2003. That's every day, now. Today's selection: "I'm a Mormon" by Janeen Brady & The Brite Singers, which is almost certainly the only march-time choral salute to The Church of Latter Day Saints.

January 03, 2003

The New York Daily News reports that CNN is jettisoning some of its more distinguished editorial talent in an apparent effort to lose the rest of whatever journalistic luster it has, even if it's only the kind that accrues to aging correspondents who once worked for serious news operations like NBC and CBS in the days before sparkly-eyed anchortwinkies and six-second stories and overbearing eye-busting graphics that make you want to kill and kill and never stop killing until there's no one left to kill. In fairness, it should be noted that this is not CNN's characterization of its motives.

Morning Fix reports that the annual Men's Fitness survey of the nation's fattest cities is out, and once again Houston leads the list. Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and St. Louis came wheezing along behind. Public-health officials scratched their heads and wondered aloud why Americans have never taken their message of sensible nutrition to heart, adding a moment later: "Oh. Right."

Latest sheep to be fleeced by phony Hollywood bookkeeping: the state of New Mexico, which is financing most of an upcoming Val Kilmer picture interest-free in exchange for a piece of the profits. "We are essentially forgoing the interest on the loan in exchange for the profit participation," explained a state official, adding tentatively: "Err... 'babe.'" Arizona, meanwhile, whispered cattily to Nevada "I can't believe they took points on the net."